PART 2:
When Mehmet Turgut wants to learn French, he learns to speak and write in French by taking lessons from the priest he met in primary school. When his talent and curiosity for painting is noticed by his art teacher, he begins to paint. Thanks to bookbinding, which he learned when he graduated from primary school, he earns 3-5 cents from there by making a binding at school. The art teacher sells the alarm machine he bought from Istanbul to his very successful student Mehmet, who then teaches him to take photographs to pay in installments for 50 lira, which was a teacher’s salary at the time. When he earns 2.5 lira from the first photo he takes, he leaves the school he studied until the middle three and starts photography.
At the age of 18 she marries Emine Hanim.
Mehmet Bey, who is heard to take cheaper photographs than photographers in Diyarbakır, is summoned to take photographs of officers from Diyarbakır’s Maden accident. When the civil servants who did not learn the new alphabet were dismissed in 1927, Mehmet Bey, who knew the Latin letters because of the French he learned, told the officers “I will teach you the new alphabet”. Therefore, the “P.T.T. He moved his house from Elazığ to Diyarbakır to write a petition in the new alphabet and start his job at the Chief Directorate upon the suggestion of “Apply to the Directorate, take a photo and get a salary”.
As long as she works as a civil servant, she always thinks of opening her own photo shop and learns retouching by looking at the retouched photos.
Nine years later, he was appointed to the Ercis district of Van. After a very challenging journey, he started to work as a civil servant, photography, as well as plaster statuettes and piggy banks for three years in Erciş.
As the law required everyone to hang flags in their homes in those years, Mehmet Bey started to sell the flags he made from red and white handmade paper according to the legal criteria.
Source: & Photography Magazine, “Talk to Zeynep Orhon Targaç” (August – September 2002)
